Short range wireless communication networks are becoming more widely used and in more and more applications, including commercial and domestic applications. Such networks can consist of from two to many nodes, between which wireless communications occur. In one particular application, such nodes or devices can be used as part of a building infrastructure for control purposes. This is commonly referred to as Home or Building Automation.
Two factors relevant to such networks are:                1. Reliability—Obtaining reliable radio communication between the nodes presents a considerable challenge, because when radio is used in buildings it suffers from interference and attenuation. There are many sources of interference and attenuation, including the type of building materials used, other wireless devices, and the objects placed inside the building.        2. Scalability—Most networks have an upper limit on the number of nodes that can exist in a network. This limit can in some cases be difficult to determine, and can have many causes, including exceeding radio range (the distance between nodes becoming too great), or more frequently, consuming all of the available radio bandwidth. This latter case is also known as congestion.        
There are many wireless communication systems presently deployed, which aim to solve these problems. Most available systems solve one problem only, at the expense of making the other problem worse.
Some systems use explicit routing of messages between nodes. In such systems, each node needs to know the path to every possible destination, through a series of intermediate nodes. This improves reliability, but has some consequent disadvantages:                a. Messages may be repeated by many intermediate nodes, leading to a long “on-air” time for a given piece of information as it is in transit from its source to its destination.        b. Each node needs to know the path to every possible destination, which means that each node needs to have the memory to store that path.        c. Such a system does not scale very well, because when one transmitting device wishes to communicate with several receiving devices, it must have routing for each of those destinations. Due to the physical limits on memory, the size of these tables is limited.        d. Scalability is also limited by wireless congestion due to the need to repeat multiple messages over a large number of devices or nodes, this being dependent on the size of the network.        
An alternative approach to that described above is to dynamically discover a route from each source node to each destination node. In this case, a separate phase of software execution is needed to run the routing discovery process. This is because routing discovery should not take place when a message is to be transmitted—it would add to message delivery latency. The separate routing discovery phase needs to be coordinated to allow each node to interrogate the other nodes in the network, and find a path to each destination. However, this approach suffers from the same problems described above and involves very complex processing to perform the dynamic discovery.
Other systems use a technique known as “mesh” networking. In this technique, each device that receives a message retransmits it, so that the message propagates to all edges of the network. Mesh networking provides better reliability because messages can be repeated many times. However, this technique still has a number of drawbacks, including:                a. Because messages are repeated by many nodes, adding more nodes to a network can quickly cause congestion        b. This approach also makes poor use of bandwidth by having messages repeated many times. A consequence is either increased latency, or the need for higher bandwidth than would otherwise be needed; and        c. Some mesh networking systems require a specific node to be designated as a central controller to coordinate the operation of the network.        
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and system which addresses at least one of the disadvantages of the prior art.